Free Love in Mid Air by Kim Wright Page B

have fun because
     you’re unhappy. This could be fun. Right now. This. With the patio and the corn on the cob and the steaks.”
    He has a point. I stare at the TV screen. Montgomery Clift puts his arm around Elizabeth Taylor’s shoulders.
    “You get so overdramatic,” Phil says. “You want too much.”
    “I don’t understand why you don’t want more.”
    “I do want more. I want peace.”
    Peace. He goes back out onto the deck. He has forgotten the tray of meat and I hang up the dead phone and carry it to him.
     He takes it from me and we both pause for a second, wordless, watching Tory beyond us in the yard. She is digging something.
     He bought her a junior gardener set a few weeks ago so that she could help him with the landscaping and now she is furiously
     focused, striking the open ground around the hydrangea bushes over and over again with her pink plastic spade. Phil makes
     a half-gesture toward her but then drops his arm. Our eyes don’t meet. I go back into the house, begin to unload the dishwasher.
     And then something strange happens.
    I always load the knives pointy side down. Phil may think I’m overdramatic, but the truth is I am a creature of habit, cautious
     and ritualized. I always arrange the knives the same way, but tonight, as I reach into the basket of utensils, there is a
     single paring knife pointing up. Put there by someone else? No, I’m the only one who ever loads the dishwasher. A single paring
     knife, left, against habit, pointy side up, and as I reach down to remove it, I stab myself. The blade of the knife pushes
     right into my palm.
    For a second it doesn’t hurt, doesn’t even bleed, but then the slash is obliterated by the blood rising and it pools in my
     hand and runs down my wrist. I have cut myself, possibly badly.
    I could scream. I could call for help. I could go out on the deck and extend my palm toward my husband. I could show him my
     stigmata and I know that Phil would clean it up, and bind it, and tell me that nothing is ever as bad as it looks. He is good
     in these circumstances. Kind, calm, methodical. A man so kind that he still gives a day every month to the free clinic, a
     man who comes to Tory’s school and talks about oral hygiene, who passes out toothbrushes and dental floss and teaches the
     kids some sort of rap song he made up about plaque. I feel lightheaded, shaky on my feet. My hand seems to have a pulse of
     its own and little gray paramecia are swimming across the surface of my vision. I twist a washtowel around my palm and shut
     my eyes. Breathe in and out slowly, press down the bubble of panic that is rising in my throat.
    Seconds pass. It does not appear that I am going to faint. When I open my eyes, I go to my purse on the kitchen desk, where
     I always leave it, because I am a wife and a mother and a creature of habit who always leaves her purse in exactly the same
     place. Standing here, looking out the kitchen window, I can see my husband and my daughter. She has brought something to show
     him—a caterpillar maybe, since they’re her favorites, or perhaps a pretty leaf or stone.
    It’s the familiar sting I always have when I observe Phil with Tory. He closes the hood on the grill and turns to her fully,
     crouching to her eye level. They bend their heads together, staring down into her flat palm, and it strikes me how much they
     look alike. They have the same profile. She is her father’s daughter, but, perhaps even more to the point, he is my daughter’s
     father. And of course I’m glad he gives himself up to the role, that she lives in the warm glow of his constant approval.
     Of course I’m glad she never has to work for his attention, and yet, watching them now through the window, there it is, the
     familiar sting. Because as he bends over her hand I can see that he is capable of caring. That his indifference to me is optional,
     a choice. Sometimes I tell myself that he is just wounded. This is what women say about men.